Now, the problem was that he was sitting in the middle of an aisle. As we were browsing, an employee of the shop came back from buying lunch, and was holding a tray. She stopped about 4 feet from my son and stood there. She looked at him, then she looked at me. Then she looked back at him. <> I don’t know if I was waiting for her to say, “excuse me,” but I know she had me flustered and eventually I found my wits and shooed him out of her way.

We left the store, but then I remembered what a nice day we’d been having, and felt again how much I NEEDED that nice day, and (here’s where mama bear starts to bare her teeth) how wronged I felt for my son, who was doing nothing wrong and had not been afforded the simple courtesy given to adults: that simple “excuse me”.

Sooo, I took my son’s hand and marched into the store and up to the counter, where the woman was chatting with a coworker. If the store hadn’t been empty, I might not have proceeded. But it was, and so I told this stately, well-groomed shopkeeper (straight from Pretty Woman’s “before” shopping trip) that my son was a person, too, and all she had to do was to say “Excuse me” to him and he would move. Flushed, indignant, and just plain mad, I told her that she was very rude to just stand there, expecting us to move out of her way simply because she was glaring at us. Who taught her such manners? My son may be small, I said, but he knows to move aside if someone says “excuse me” or even “please move”. I then turned and whirled out of the store, never to return again. Which is saying something, because they have REALLY nice purses and umbrellas.

It really doesn’t matter how anyone feels about sitting next to children, being near children, having a baby on an airplane, etc. They don’t get to decide that. As you’ve said, children happen to be people, too, and they get to take up space in this world just like everybody else…

My blood pressure went up just reading your post–you must have been so angry!

I’ve worked in a restaurant for almost 5 years and we get a few kids each night. Most of the time they’re no trouble. It bothers me when I see families eating out at 10pm since their kids are obviously tired.

We rarely eat out and when do we usually do it without the kids, but we were surprised how good they were the last time we went out.

Ps. Congrats on your guest post

I remember once with Jeffrey was around 2, he pulled such a tantrum (very rare) in a store that everyone was staring. I was trying desperately to quiet him down and started making my way out when I saw it wasn’t going to work. I overheard one of the associates from the store tell her colleague, “she doesn’t know how to handle her kid”. Kids get tired, they sometimes get out of hand, but at that moment, I felt a little like I didn’t know what I was doing. Then I snapped out of it and realized that she was in the wrong, not me.

Depending on my mood, I can be quite flippant; I may have turned to them and said, “fine with me, I’ve had people better than you not want to sit by me”

The children in restaurants issue is (as far as I’ve experienced) a peculiarly North American one. Last summer I was in the south of France, eating in restaurants every night. I’d been concerned about bringing my then 2 month old to some of those places, but needn’t have worried. There were children (especially babies & toddlers) everywhere, even the Michelin 2 star restaurant we went to. More often than not, the servers offered to hold the baby while I enjoyed my dinner. In France, children are recognized as people and treated as such. They are a part of life, as is good food. Parents are not relegated to the Chuck E Cheese equivalent for the sin of having reproduced. Sigh.

I wrote about having to leave a restaurant not too long ago – http://bit.ly/xGpWM wonder what those people would have thought of my family?